The Socialist Emmanuel Grégoire has been elected mayor of Paris, roundly beating the former rightwing minister Rachida Dati.
He instantly took a victory bike ride with future councillors on Sunday night to show that the city would continue its pro-cycling and environmental policies.
“There’s lots to do and we’ll start tomorrow morning,” said the Socialist MP who has a long track record at city hall, where he had worked with the former Socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo.
After running on a united left ticket including the Greens, Grégoire said there were several priorities for the French capital.
“I’m thinking of the most fragile people, those who will sleep on the streets tonight,” he said. “I’m thinking of children who are suffering … all the most vulnerable who need the left.” He said he had “an immense responsibility” to Parisians.
Grégoire was projected to have won with about 52% of the vote. This marked a clear win against Dati, who served in government under Emmanuel Macron and Nicolas Sarkozy and had sought to win the French capital for the right after 25 years of it being governed by the left.
During the campaign, Grégoire, 48, had warned that Dati would turn the capital into “a Trumpist laboratory of the alliance between the right and far right”.
After Sunday’s result, Grégoire said Paris would resist the right and far right in the leadup to next year’s presidential elections. Macron’s two terms as president come to an end next spring and Marine Le Pen’s far-right, anti-immigration National Rally (RN) is polling high.
Grégoire said: “Paris will be the heart of the resistance against this alliance of the right, which seeks to take away what we hold most precious and fragile: the simple joy of living together.”
Hidalgo, the outgoing mayor, said: “Paris has chosen the future with the democratic and green left.”
In France’s second city, Marseille, the mayor, Benoît Payan, won with his leftwing coalition including the Socialists and the Greens – holding back a rise of the RN.
Payan said Marseille had delivered “a message of peace and unity”. He said it was a win for “humanists who refuse the voices that push for division”.
Elsewhere, the former prime minister Édouard Philippe is now expected to kickstart his centre-right candidacy for the French presidency next year after being re-elected as mayor of the northern port town of Le Havre.
Philippe was prime minister during Macron’s first term in office, including during the start of the Covid pandemic. He has been building up for more than a year to run for president in 2027.
As the only presidential hopeful running in the municipal elections, Philippe won with more than 47% in a town he has run since 2010, and is now expected to use the win to accelerate his presidential campaign.
But he faces other potential candidates on a crowded centre right, including the justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, and the former prime minister Gabriel Attal, who heads Macron’s centrist Renaissance party.
Philippe said: “The people of Le Havre know that there is reason for hope when all people of good will come together in a discourse of truth and reject the extremes and its simplistic solutions.”
More than 1,500 cities and towns voted in the second round of local elections on Sunday, seen as a test of the political temperature before the presidential election.
Among the first towns to count their votes, the RN failed to win some of its key targets. Laure Lavalette, a close ally of Le Pen, did not win in Toulon, a historic naval city on the Mediterranean with a population of 180,000. Instead, the current traditional-right mayor held the city.
In the south-eastern city of Nîmes, the RN’s Julien Sanchez failed to win. Instead, the communist Vincent Bouget, heading a union of the left, won the city, which had been run by the traditional right for 25 years.
But as the count continued, the RN won the town of Carcassonne in the south-west, and several other towns.
The RN leader, Jordan Bardella, said the increase in local councillors was “historic”. He said: “Never has the RN and its allies had so many elected officials across France.” He said this marked a “dynamic in favour of our ideas”.
Crucially, a key ally of the far right won in Nice on the French Riviera – France’s fifth biggest city.
Éric Ciotti, who quit as leader of the traditional right’s party, Les Républicains, and joined forces with Le Pen in 2024, won Nice from his bitter rival and one-time rightwing ally, Christian Estrosi.
Ciotti’s new party, the Union of the Right for the Republic, could now increase its membership and will position itself to support a far-right presidential candidate next year.
The first results also showed some wins for Les Républicains, including the traditionally Socialist stronghold of Clermont-Ferrand.
The Green mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet, was predicted to keep hold of the city, ahead of Jean-Michel Aulas, the former head of Olympique Lyonnais Football Club, who had run for the right.
